We had started a research thread (http://goo.gl/sleOa) awhile back and just wanted to come back and present the final project results. A little backstory/recap, this was a summer quarter project for the 3rd year industrial design (product track) students at DAAP. Our professor met an alumni of our program, Bill Ropp, and they put the project together. Bill is an independent consultant for the ebike industry and is very well know and has lots of experience on the subject. We had guest speakers from Fuji, SRAM, and Ed Benjamin of L.E.V.A. Fuji donated about 8 prototype bikes for us to study, use, enjoy and SRAM provided components for our final prototypes. Our studio has about 20 students, we divided into 5 groups and each designed for a different market segment.

The project was broken into 5 stages: Research, Ideation, Validation, Finalization, and Prototyping. We had about 10 weeks to do the whole thing.

I am part of the Urban Commuter group. Currently we are working on putting something more polished together to post here, but for now I can at least provide a render of the final bike. We are currently scrambling to get portfolios together for our next co-op. I'll post more when I can. Thanks.

-James

Just so people can get a better idea, these are from a ROUGH draft of my portfolio.

Thanks. It was one of those things were I took a ton of photos just to document the project for our process book and I realized that I could put them all together in a little video. It worked out pretty well. Our professors are always tellings us to document everything.

The video is pretty prototyping focused. That's what I took the most pictures of. It's hard to get pictures when you are drawing or working on the renders/modeling. In the next week or so I'll try to get a more complete presentation of everything on here. It was a lot of work and is pretty hard to compress down into something short like a portfolio. It was very much a group effort and I'd like to show all our work.

Just an additional piece of information on the project:

Our professor arranged for us to showcase our work (all the groups) at Interbike (US Bicycle Trade Show) this past fall in Las Vegas. Two representatives from our class were chosen (myself and one other) and were flown to the show for 4 days. It was awesome to get industry feedback on the projects. We didn't have the best space or set up there, it was all pretty last minute. However, I'm happy to be given the opportunity by my school to go to a convention like this and present our work, and most importantly meet people in the industry. Many thanks to Bill Ropp for helping us there and introducing us to great people.